My coast: Samuel West

My coast: Samuel West

Actor and director Samuel West returns to Prussia Cove, Cornwall, twice a year to indulge his passion for birdwatching

Mar 14, 2012 03:25:00 PM

 

If I had to choose one area of the British coast, it would be southwest Cornwall. Every year, since I was 17, I visit in spring and autumn to help out in the kitchens at the International Musicians Seminar in Prussia Cove. I now look after the music library, and stage-manage some of the concerts. The rest of the time I go birdwatching. I catch the sleeper to Penzance, which leaves Paddington at a quarter to 12 in the evening. I sit up drinking a whisky until the train reaches Reading, and then I go to my bunk. The first thing you see in the morning, if you time it right, is St Michael’s Mount. It’s one of the great railway journeys in the world.
‘The coast is an important place for birds. Prussia Cove is a small, southeast-facing cove between Penzance and Helston, in Mount’s Bay, just east of St Michael’s Mount. You get the shore birds feeding on the shoreline, land birds that can’t go any further and birds that get blown in; it’s a fecund place. The area is full of brilliant places for birding. Take Cot Valley, which has the extraordinary Land’s End youth hostel, a few miles from Land’s End itself. It must be the most beautiful setting in Britain. It’s like Rivendell. It’s this incredibly damp, warm valley, where the birds are amazing. In the autumn you get exhausted migrants missing the Scilly Isles and just hitting the southwest corner – the stocking toe of England. They fly down and go to the first valley they can find. If the winds are right, the chances of seeing a real rarity are quite high, and even if they aren’t, you can see lots of blackcaps and whitethroats singing, and the weather is always wonderful.’

Sam West stars as angel-turned-lawyer Zak Gist in 'Eternal Law', a new black comedy drama for ITV1, and plays King George VI in the forthcoming movie 'Hyde Park On Hudson'.